‘R’ You Ready to Analyze Big Data?

What is R? If you guessed, “a letter in the alphabet,” you’re only halfway right. The letter R also represents a programming language typically used by people to compile statistics as well as analyze or create visual representations of a data set. In many ways it is similar to products like Microsoft Excel, SPSS and STATA but free to download and perhaps even more powerful.

Unfamiliar with R, I turned to my colleague Jeff Hemsley, an active contributor to the R community of bloggers. I was confident that Jeff would direct me to helpful resources. This Q & A list below does exactly that!

What is R?

R is a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls and surveys of data miners are showing R’s popularity has increased substantially in recent years.